Partner Richard Lippe
Queer Places:
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
Robert Paul "Robin" Wood (23 February 1931 – 18 December 2009) was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn. Wood was a longtime member - and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto's York University - of the editorial collective which publishes CineACTION!, a film theory magazine. Wood was also York professor emeritus of film.[1]
Wood was born in Richmond, Surrey, England. He attended Jesus College,
Cambridge, where he was influenced by F. R. Leavis and A. P. Rossiter, and
graduated in 1953 with a diploma in education. From 1954 to 1958, Wood taught
in schools in both England and Sweden. After a year in Lille, France, teaching
English, Wood returned to schools in England, and again in Sweden, where he
met Aline Macdonald[2] whom he married on 17 May 1960.
Wood began to contribute to the film journal Movie in 1962, primarily on the strength of an essay he wrote for Cahiers du cinéma on Hitchcock's Psycho. In 1965, he published his first book, Hitchcock's Films. From 1969 to 1972, under the aegis of Peter Harcourt, Wood was a lecturer in film at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. In September 1974, Wood and his wife divorced. Around this time, he also had a relationship with John Anderson, the dedicatee in at least one of Wood's books. Later he was to meet Richard Lippe,
with whom he lived from 1977 until his death in 2009. From 1973 to 1977, Wood
was a lecturer on film studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry, one of
the first three such courses in Britain, which he founded with financial
support from the British Film Institute.[3]
After his coming out as a gay man, Wood's writings became more – though not exclusively – political, primarily from a stance associated with Marxist and Freudian thinking, and with gay rights. The turning point in Wood's views can arguably be pinpointed in his essay "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic", originally a speech at London's National Film Theatre and later published in the January 1978 issue of Film Comment. It was subsequently included in the revised edition of his book Personal Views.
Wood died of leukaemia[5] on 18 December 2009 in Toronto. Wood’s book Hitchcock’s Films received four votes in a 2010 Sight & Sound poll of the best film-related books ever written.[13]
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